


Renegeration

by ecrituredudesir



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Death, Gore, Graphic Torture, Medieval Torture, Regeneration, Torture, Violence, extreme violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 20:12:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18999685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrituredudesir/pseuds/ecrituredudesir
Summary: Antoine the Smeargle experiences the gift of immortality, reviving each time that he is killed. Soon captured by the notorious King Bertrand and experimented on by his torturer, Helgr, he finds that his 'gift' might be more of a curse.A commission for someone on furaffinity.





	Renegeration

Antoine’s day had been eventful in the worst of ways. As much as he tried to remember fully what happened, it still came in patch works of pieces and fragments; stumbling through the city hard brought him through a haze of vague and confusing alleyways and streets with little memory of how he had gotten in the city, or of where he might be going. The streets were unfamiliar to him, and the more he tried to find his bearings, the more lost he seemed to become. Inevitably, he’d stumbled out into the street—and into the path of an oncoming buggy. His death had been instant, his rib cage crunched under the heavy steel wheels of the moving buggy, and that was when it had gone black. He had woken an indeterminate number of hours later on the stone, cold slab of a morgue, fully intact and without a scratch on him apart from the fact that his fur was thick and coated with his own blood.

From there, the Smeargle had wandered down the hallway, trying to get a grasp of where he was. Eventually as he moved down the hallway he came across a young man that seem to be mopping. He wanted to ask where he was but just as he opened his mouth to do so, the man locked up and fear across this face. His immediate response was to lift the mop that he'd been using, and then smash it across Antoine's face. The force of the blow of surprising, powerful enough that it made his neck snap almost instantly. Antoine's body crumbled to the ground, and along the way his head smashed into the cold brick wall. Once again death took him, and he was faced with the blackness of several more hours.

When he had finally come to again he found two guard at some points standing over him. At some point, the same young man who had knocked him unconscious, and presumably killed him for the second time, had alerted the royal guard to his presence. It had come after seeing Antoine's body slowly regenerate itself while he was still 'dead.' While he was still under the effects of his death, the guards had managed to alert their superiors, and just as soon as he became conscious of where he was at he found himself being whisked away to the castle, where he was now facing King Bertrand.

 

"And that's all I remember," Antoine finished, looking up to the king with some hesitation. The king regarded him with only passing skepticism, as if he couldn't be certain if the tale was a lie, or if the two guards and various other witnesses could be trusted to validate the claims of the strange Smeargle. However, he manages to hide his suspicion, welcoming Antoine as he might an honored guest

“Really, then,” the aged king hummed, smiling as he lifted the glass that he’d poured for the Smeargle. “We should celebrate to your good fortune. It isn’t amazing that you’ve managed to recover and regenerated so many times so far with this strange ability of yours?” The elderly Serperior placed the goblet into Antoine’s hands, and then moved to pour himself a glass as well, lifting it to toast with his hail as well.

“I’m not certain I’d call it lucky, but maybe it does have bit of a silver lining. I don’t have to worry about feeling pain after I wake up, so the regeneration isn’t that bad.” He admitted, lifting the drink to his lips in the toast, presuming that he saw the king do the same. It’s only when the liquid begins to burn in his throat does Antoine realize that he’s been tricked, and the king’s goblet was still full, only vaguely tilted in the direction of his lips, as if he’d taken a sip. As his vision began to blur with tears, the last thing he could get a clear view of was the king’s delighted gaze as the Smeargle reached up to grasp at his throat. The poison was taking hold surprisingly quickly, and as he choked on the sensation of what felt like the inside of his throat dissolving, he crumpled to the floor. The stabbing sensation spread throughout his stomach, making him flinch and recoil in on himself, curling as a messy mixture of foaming saliva and blood burned at the corners of his mouth. With tears streaming through the fur of his cheeks, the last thing he saw was the morbid fascination on King Bertrand’s face—then slowly, Antoine’s convulsions faded into stillness.

Presumably, hours passed once more. When Antoine woke again, this time it was to lift his head, finding himself already seated upwards. There was no give to his movements, finding himself strapped in a chair in a stone brick room; he was still in the castle, but now he had been moved down to the grand dungeons and fastened to a wooden chair. Heavy restraints circled both his wrists and his ankles, and there was no movement to his torso either, after finding that a heavy metal clasp was holding his stomach in place.

It took him a few moments to realize where he was, but in that time, he also found that he wasn’t alone; standing near the doorway was the aged king himself, watching his movements with bright eyes in the shadows. At his side, the torturer, Helgr, stood in her full leather attire. She was regarding him with more interest than the bright, almost childlike confusion on the king’s features. The sight of the torturer’s attire and the look on Bertrand’s features told Antoine that the various rumors of the king’s sadism and torturous tendencies may not have been the mere gossip that he’d assumed it would be—and that came with the realization of what the situation was that he had landed himself into.

Constant torture took victims, and a steady supply of victims tended to draw attention from the most unfortunate of places. It’s with a slow dread that Antoine realized why the king looked so excited at having him there, trapped in the chair after the painful poison death.

Antoine didn’t have to even wait to ask, considering Bertrand immediately opened his mouth, the ancient wrinkles of his expression folding. “It’s fortunate indeed that you have this power, because now we have a new test subject that can be used and abused, over and over and over. You’re mine, now,” He hummed in slow observation, leaning to the wall to support himself. “You’re a lucky find. No matter how many subjects I have, you’d be surprised at how difficult it is to draw in new test victims without some rabble in the populace raising a stink over ‘killing the accused.’” His expression turned petulant, sneering in frustration and disgust as he watched Antoine start to fight against his bindings. It’s clear in his eyes; he planned on testing the full extent of how immortal Antoine really was.

“Go ahead,” King Bertrand instructed finally with a glance to Helgr, giving her the instruction to begin the true test of how much Antoine would be able to take. The scaled, ancient king would be watching every second of it with baited breath, excitement in his gaze for what was to come.

“You got it, You Bertie,” she cooed, giving Antoine a look of excitement. She spoke as if she were purring around every word, clearly playing up the pseudo appearance of someone supposedly seductive, but the Smeargle could only feel bile rising at the back of his throat from the attempt of the executioner at acting cute or coy. As he could see every inch of her moving ‘smoothly’ to him in the heavy leather of her outfit, he could only feel disgust welling up in him—and then fear, when he saw her reach over to the table just out of his sight behind him to pull a rusted saw from out of sight.

“No, no-“ Antoine started in cold terror the minute he saw the tool, starting to struggle against the bindings. Despite his protests, though, Helgr continued without hesitation, placing the blade against his wrist, just under where it was held back by the binding, and began to saw past the flesh of his wrist. His screams began to echo out through the room immediately, his eyes wide but unseeing, too frozen by the pain to look down and see the horrors of the saw slowly making its way through his right wrist. He could feel every bit of it, the sinew and muscle shredded from one another, and then the deep, solid clink of the blade hitting the inside of his wrist. To make matters worse, he could feel the sickening cracking as the saw made its way through his wrist and the bone there next, until it was finally hanging on by only the meat under the bone. Here, Helgry morbidly squeezed his hand like she were holding it comfortingly, and then pulled it taut to continue to saw through the material there, as well.

He was going pale now, the copious amount of blood gushing from the wound around the severed bone clearly affecting how conscious he was, nearly on the verge of blacking out as he gave one, panicked, agonized noise after another. It was hard to tell what was bleeding into a moan and what was a sob from the wetness of his eyes, but his tormentors waited and watched on bated breaths. Finally, after several minutes passed, the hand that she had let drop to the floor in disdain began to slowly seem to disintegrate. It was like watching the limb melt away in rapid decay, though it seemed to let off no particular smell and it left behind no trace of the former limb, not even the bones of his paw.

Just as quickly as the severed limb disappeared, the stump of his bleeding arm began to let off a faint, soft glow. Their attention lifted from where they’d watched the limb disappear to now see the small spurt of growth from the center of the stump. A small hand, which then proceeded to grow slowly into a full sized version of itself until it was like the executioner had never severed it. Both of them watched with a twisted fascination to the entire time. The glow was gone with the freshly regenerated limb, but now that he was in one piece again, the King clearly wanted to see more.

“Put him on the rack. See if he recovers from breaking as he does dismemberment.” Bertrand commanded, his eyes bright as he regarded the two of them as he moved to a small, proper looking chair in the corner. It looked as if he were settling into somewhere as comfortable as his own throne, though it had none of the finery. He was preparing for a show, and part of that was what worried Antoine the most.

“As you wish, Young Bertie,” Helgr replied, her tone still sickly sweet. As she started to undo his clasps, Antoine thought he might have a brief chance of struggling, to perhaps escape or get a weapon, but the minute that she got the clasp around his waist undone, the Miltank was already moving to lift him by his throat, quelling any attempt he might have of trying to push his way free. His body was slammed to a wooden rack nearby, winding him as his limbs were strapped down to the metal clasps of the table once more.

He recognized the crude device, and he could feel the way the wooden sections of the ‘table’ under him rocked against one another with his squirming. Despite her age, the Miltank seemed incredibly powerful, and that was what had him more afraid her capabilities than the commands the king might issue. The new bindings are looser than the clasps of the chair had been—they’re connected to a set of chains rather than bolted into wood, but he found the give in them slowly starting to lessen. Helgr had moved over to a massive, wooden wheel nearby, and then he remembered the king’s order. He hadn’t been strapped to a table, he’d been strapped to the rack itself.

“Wait, wait- I can, we can talk, I’ll tell you anything-“ Antoine hastily tried to bargain as he felt his arms go taut, stretched above his head. Simultaneously, the chains at his ankles began to draw tense as well. The wheel was pulling the chains connected to all four of his limbs, but very clearly in two different directions. His voice caught in his chest as he felt the chains start to pull him fully taut, his posture straightening as the strain began in slow, noticeable tension echoing across his body. Helgr was starting to feel the subtle tension and resistance that the turn of the wheel was offering, and she knew it was starting to cause a strain on him when she could hear the subtle way his breath caught in his chest.

He could feel every click of the rack start to rock through his bones then, and every time she turned the crank to pull the chains binding his limbs a little tighter, he started to feel the gradual strain on his muscles. It was a subtle burn at first but as he felt each click draw the chains tighter and start to pop his spine and joints, the discomfort began. The metal of the shackles connected to the chains began to dig against his wrists and ankles. His muscles had already started to scream at the stretch, and with his muscles screaming his lips parted to let out a strangled cry of his own, but it was worse when he realized the tighter his body was stretched, the more difficult it was to breathe. The pain was making him react, drawing those tight yelps and gasps as tears welled in his eyes. It was hard to tell what parts of him hurt worse in reaction to the clicking sound of the wheel drawing him ever tighter, but as his eyes bulged, wide in their terror as he realized his sounds were drawing tighter and shorter the less he could inhale to do so. His head was spinning, finding it hard to keep his focus on anything with the burn of every limb and the shortness of air filling his lungs.

The tension was drawing to a crescendo, though, his hands and feet shaking with the drawn tension to every muscle pulled taut by the rack, until finally, the tension in his frame seemed to snap in a series of wet, disgusting pops as his limbs dislocated. The pain shot through him like a lightning bolt, but his body giving way had one benefit: with his limbs dislocating, it gave him more ‘give’ on the rack, letting him get a brief moment of two lungs full of air so he can finally let loose a scream that echoed through the dungeons and made Bertrand lean forward in interest in his chair.

It wasn’t enough to kill him by any means, however, Bertrand was ready to account for that too. “The box. Before he regenerates,” he instructed, giving a single gesture to another tool that was out of sight from Antoine’s positioning. Helgr moved to adjust the positioning of the rack so it lay flat instead of the angle that left him loosely hanging from the top chains. It took the stress off of his dislocated, loose limbs, but even the most subtle of movements left him tender and aching, tears leaking from his eyes as he tried to find a way to deal with the pain. That agony alone was enough to distract him from what the executioner did next; he could hear the clank of metal, and soon, a strange metal frame was placed like a picture frame around his head. There was a sharp dome that pressed flush with his skull, and he could feel the dangerous sharp, spike-like teeth around the cap digging down to his head now. Any wrong movement would dig those teeth in, though he could feel the jostle of metal again, and the cap pressed down. The underside of his jaw began to press against the metal rod that served as the bottom of the frame. To his horror, he could feel that creak of metal again, like another crank entirely, but at the top of his head. It was slowly screwing the cap down, tighter and tighter, despite the resistance of his very bones. The pressure caused a splitting headache at first, but then it started the real damage. As his teeth could no longer part or open, he could feel them grinding against one another and the pressure only seemed to be getting worse from there. There was no give to the long screw being forced down by the handle at the top of the metal square, and the pressure on his teeth began to dig them against his gums, first. Then came the subtle creaking of the find fracture lines of his skull, followed by the stress if the device creating a strange pressure in his ears. The whimpers of pain from his dislocated limbs had been muffled, and in the face of this new, distracting agony—he found quickly that the only noises he could make were the distressed, muffled groans through his slowly shattering teeth, unable to deal with the pressure first.

His eyeballs had begun to bulge as the pressure in his skull increased as well, too swollen from the internal pressure for him to cover with his eyelids any longer. Even when he struggled to blink, he found that he was unable to close them completely. Despite any twitches of his neck he tried to give, Helgr held fast to the crank that was lowering the dome continued to press down. All at once, not unlike a squeezed grape, everything seemed to ‘pop’ at once. His skull cracked under the intense pressure, popping his eyes from his sockets as the force splintered his skull and drove shards of the bone directly into the horizon of where his skullcap had shattered.

The limbs that could still move twitched violently, his nerves reacting solely from the splinters of skull working their way into his brain as she continued to tighten the head cage down regardless of the damage done. Before long, everything went black again.

They continued testing his body in various ways over the next few days, with every waking moment spent in some sort of anxiety of what would come next, or the pain of their actual tortures. The most recent haunted him still—just that morning they had restrained him to the same chair that he’d woken up strapped to, with hot coals burning just under his slightly lifted feet—he still remembered the scent of his own flesh cooking as he screamed in agony; his screams had only stopped only when the coals had burned through and melted away the crusted, burned-black skin to dissolve the nerves that had been screaming along with him. The sound of his own bones, cooked away from the flesh and left to crumble, falling into the coals below and scattering ashes little by little and sending cinders up to burn at his calves. Then, as if it’d never happened, he regenerated as normal and he had been left to the horrible realization that no matter how much he was tormented, his mind stayed sharp; it was another version of his regeneration. While so many others would have been broken mentally before to deal with the pain, each time he regenerated it was to face new, fresh agonies.

He was shuddering in the dampness of the cell they kept him in when Helgr appeared once more. No matter how many times he’d flinched away, she managed to drag him forward once more with no struggle; this time was no exception again. She dragged him down another hallway, finding that he was lead to a room with a large hole in the middle; a guillotine sat next to it, and his neck was hastily fastened in the rack under it.

“I’ve been thinking how interesting it is that despite your immortality,” Bertrand mused aloud from where Antoine could see him perked on the same chair he normally sat on for their ‘sessions,’ except moved into the new room, “You still seem to fear death. Is it instinctive, or can there be a death that you can’t return from?” It’s hard to tell if he sounds bored or not, though part of Antoine fears what his fate might be if the king had grown bored of torturing him. “Or do you worry that there’s a time that your magic will stop working? That each time might be the last time?”

While the king monologued, Helgr moved forward, prying open his mouth and placing a rope in his mouth. Though he was trying his best to spit it out, he soon froze—realizing that the rope itself was connected to the blade hanging high over his head. The minute he let go of that rope, he’d be decapitated. From the corner of his eye, he could see the distant ocean below; it was part of the dungeon that overlooked the cliffside ocean. He could only assume how many of the king’s prior victims had been washed out to the sea below.

“Make him work for it,” Bertrand commanded, and on queue, Helgr pulled a small knife from her stock, placing it against his exposed belly and dragging it through the skin and muscle of his lower belly. Still conscious of every bit of pain, he screamed and grit his teeth against the rope all at once, the sound muffled and strained against the gag as he fought to keep it tight in mouth. Finding the slice did nothing, the Miltank reached deep into his stomach to pull his intestines from his belly, lifting their looping viscera to rest on a hook nearby. As she had with the rack, she began to twist a nearby crank; before his eyes, his insides were being stretched from him inch by inch. He was watching himself be actively disemboweled, little by little, and this time it was not the pain that started to make his vision fade black at the edges, but the blood loss. Most of his intestines had been pulled free form his body when he finally blacked out once more, and his jaw went slack.

With the smooth sound of metal on wood, followed by a sharp *thud*, his head was dismembered from his body and left to fall down the pit to the ocean below. Both watched the show with familiarity by now, having seen Antoine die repeatedly with no failure in his regenerative properties bringing him back—this time, however, Betrand could only watch on in horror as the body seemed to fade away just as Antoine’s severed hand had the first day of his imprisonment. Despite his repeated enjoyment of watching him suffer and die, over and over again, he was left with nothing of his favorite victim.

“No,” the king snarled, standing to peer over the hole where his victim’s head had fallen, but by now, it was long washed out to sea—where the body was reforming with the head, sending him spiraling through the waves.

Antoine lost count of how many times he woke only to drown within seconds, the abyss of darkness fading in and out every time he came to. Eventually, he finally washed up on a beach far, far away from Betrand’s castle. In silence, he lay sprawled across the sands, dazed and uncertain of his location, the last several days of misery still fresh in his mind thanks to his regenerative qualities. Still, despite the horrors he lived through, he couldn’t help but count himself lucky that he’d escaped, even if by fluke; no part of him doubted that Betrand would have kept him there for years in misery, or until as the king had addressed it, “the magic ran out.”


End file.
